SOUNDS OF SILENCE

If words are just signs, and the signs become mere indicators of other signs, and then metaphors and similes, then who are we when all of that is wiped away? Are we left with another kind of language, or just silence? And into the silence, the loudest voice of all?

I think about this when I listen to people speak – about anything. It’s as if “we” step back and position ourselves behind a wall of artifice, a loud and thick veneer of sounds. And that’s who we are. It’s also as if we’re in a conspiracy agreeing to hide what lies beneath and behind the wall. Behind it seems to be a silence, communication in that silence, which goes around (transcends) that middle ground, the intermediary known as the human ego.

We need, after all, to distinguish ourselves as unique individuals in order to promote meaning and purpose. And language is the only means by which to achieve and maintain our separateness. You have your words, and I have mine. Hence, your persona and mine.

And so, it begs the question: Are we as an evolving species headed in a particular direction with regard to language? As an analogy, I think about the century’s old philosophical argument over the human diet, the diametrically opposite beliefs in the East and West. Aside from the same arguments concerning the wisdom teeth, the ratio of types of teeth which are evolving (devolving), and even the appendix, there’s the corollary disagreement over the types of food we’re supposed to be eating and how much. In the West we seem to think out canines are “coming in,” hence our growing dependency on meat – and more of it. Those in the East say the opposite: we’re not only supposed to be eating lighter, we’re supposed to be eating less. Hence the related claim that the appendix and the wisdom teeth are also “coming in,” not going out.

One might use this analogy to say language as we know it is “going out,” not coming in. What IS coming in is perhaps what we could tentatively call another type of language which requires no words or sounds. Communication continues on without interruption (maybe with some minor stops and starts). It reminds me of two people (or human and animal) who have known each other all their lives. At first and for years words/sounds are used. But by the time they’re reached their autumn years together communication is nearly all telepathic in nature. Think of Anne Sullivan’s work with Helen Keller. Think of the Horse Whisperer. Think of your own elderly dog’s ability to know your every mood.

Telepathic communication, and most forms of silent communication that we know of, still involves words. To know isn’t to really know (to confirm knowing) until reduced to a language we all share, a language we know binds us together. Even to simply think about what you know is thought about in words. But isn’t there an intuitive phase which comes into play prior to (and after) the words? And what if we were to leave it there?

It’s a place we all pass through in childbirth – prior to cooing, babbling, lallation, echoialla (imitations), and expressive jargon (phonemes, morphemes, etc). Mother-child interaction is intuitive and pre-lingual. Then she begins talking to the child using exaggerated intonation, high-pitched voices, repetitions, and short sentences – and “wordplay” begins. – Maybe it’s a place we will pass through again, if not before death, then evolutionarily – phylogeny recapitulating ontogeny?

As this debate is still theoretical (at least in the West), my own bias hails from intuition. And that tells me that not only is the East correct on the subject of food and diet, we are also evolving toward a place of “no language” but “high communication.” “Less” becomes “more.” There are undoubtedly lots of Western-thinkers who believe in words as much as they believe in meat (“thicker” and lots more of it). But in my view more and more humans are finding themselves – to use a figure of speech – in “awe” of life in general. Awe stipulates a condition of utter amazement and speechlessness: no words can describe their experience. Words fail us – fail to live up to , to accurately measure, what is perceived by the senses and/or the intellect.

The story goes that when Louis and Clark came around bends in the river or peered over mountaintops on their way to the Pacific Meriwether Lewis invented (or borrowed) the term “sublime.” He meant it to denote something which could not be described in words. It was simply “breathtaking” and one could not (dare not) diminish it by attempting to describe it. Silence was their only option, a kind of spiritual contract inviting them to communicate at a very private level. These were fleeting moments, that is, until they reached the next turn in the river and the next mountaintop.

Is the “sublime” a harbinger of some kind? Does it demarcate a direction we’re all going? Years ago, before they were exterminated by invading white people ridden with disease, there was a South American (Brazilian) stone-age tribe that spoke in nothing but verbs. It was immediately instructive and challenging. Imagine trying to communicate in verbs only, for even just five minutes. Initially, it seems ludicrous, and the ego wants to stop and call the whole thing absurd. What it’s doing is trying to regain control as it panics for being set aside – even for just five minutes.

But stay with it, and that sense of timelessness becomes a direct threat to the ego. This is because a) we are forced into here & now, and b) the separation between subject and object vanishes. There is no “I” versus “thou,” no “I am this, but not that.” There is just the becoming of what one is doing or witnessing: “raining” instead of “”it is raining,” “eating” instead of “I am eating.” Being turns into endless becoming. – It magically thrusts us into a higher state of consciousness.

And by the way, as Alan Watts so brilliantly called out, “When we say ‘it is raining,’ what is IT?” – “It” is nothing more than a linguistic rule, a grammatical convention to fill in a gap in order to communicate normally. “It” serves no function beyond that. Finally, in a flourish of limericks for which he was so famous, he answered his own question in his essay titled This is It (paraphrased from memory): “I am it, you are it, it is this, it is that, he is it, she is it, it is it, and that is that!” – Slowly we begin realizing the tactics of evasion in ordinary communication.

This brings us to those arts which communicate by successfully circumventing words altogether through pure expression. Dance, music, architecture, painting – they all basically strive to achieve “the sublime.” They work to subtract the middleman, the self, between observer and observed. If done well, they succeed. Tragically, even when successful, we leave the theater or gallery and typically indulge the need to share. And sharing requires words again. “The moment” is robbed of the magic it initially captured. And we’re basically right back where we started. We kill the experience as a condition to simply function again.

So the question arises: Could there ever be an apres theater space where the sharing could remain silent? Another way of basically saying that we’ve become the dance, the painting, the musical score, and remain wrapped in that consciousness? Something to simply carry home with us and prolong “the moment” even in the company of others? More importantly, to try and integrate that higher consciousness into everyday life? Victor Hugo said, “Let us take the hammer to theories and poetic systems. Let us throw down the old plastering that conceals the facade of art.”

And that returns us to, among other things, metaphors. Metaphors probably encompass half the human vocabulary. We use them even when we don’t know it. Words themselves are merely symbols (signifiers) of something else (signifieds). But beyond that, we use abstract references every minute of the day to convey the simplest observations. Aristotle first brought it to public attention, saying it “consists in giving the thing a name that belongs to something else.” None of us can live without metaphors, but they become dangerous when they begin taking control of reality – as language has done anyway.

In her books Illness aS Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors, Susan Sontag stressed the tragic consequences of turning illnesses like cancer and AIDS into metaphors of failure, invasions by demons and monsters,, God’s punishment, and so forth. “My subject is not physical illness itself but the uses of illness as a figure or metaphor. My point is that illness is not a metaphor, and that the most truthful way of regarding illness – and the healthiest way of being ill – is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking.”

In the end (if language brings us to an end), it becomes a kind of existential death wish, the ceasing to exist as we know existence. “A final characteristic of man’s existence,” wrote Rollo May, “… is the capacity to transcend the immediate situation…. [E]xistence is always in the process of self-transcending. This capacity is already stated in the term exist – that is, “to stand out.” Existing involves a continual emerging, in the sense of emergent evolution, a transcending of one’s past and present in terms of the future. Thus transcendere – literally “to climb over or beyond “- describes what every human being is engaged in doing every moment….Nietzsche has Zarathustra proclaim, … ‘I am that which must ever surpass itself.’”

Being is becoming, having is knowing, and “being there is knowing there’s nothing to do, and nothing is left undone.” That more or less leaves us out of the larger equation, does it not? There is just “awe” and the sublime, and nothing is left undone or unsaid. As Buckminster Fuller once said, “I seem to be a verb.” The “metaphor” of the river comes to mind. We become it. And of the river Siddhartha says, it’s the only thing which is at its beginning, its middle, and its end all at the same time.

“Having exhausted his appetites, the man who approaches a limit-form of detachment no longer wants to perpetuate himself, he loathes surviving in someone else, to whom moreover he has nothing more to transmit…. With neither profession nor lineage, he achieves – final hypostasis – his own conclusion….”

“I no longer want to collaborate with the light or or use the jargon of life. And I shall no longer say ‘I am’ without blushing. The immodesty of the breath, the scandal of the lungs are linked to the abuse of an auxiliary verb.” – E.M. Cioran

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